Ask any VC how excited on a scale of one to ten they are about their latest deal, and they’ll tell you eleven out of ten. Veterans will probably be a little more cautious and tell you they’re at a ten out of ten—but despite knowing all the risks, a VC simply isn’t going to get over the line unless they’re pretty blown away by an idea.

That’s because of the simple math of competition. I get 2000 things passing through my inbox in any given year, and I make about ten investments per year.

How excited do you think I am if I’m only picking the top 10 out of 2000? Do you think any of those handful of deals are seven out of ten? I see TONS of sevens—and they’re often the hardest ones to pass on. They’re nothing necessarily wrong with them. The team is good. The idea is good. It’s just—good. Nothing particularly striking that makes you think about it days and nights after the meeting.

I’m sure it’s incredibly frustrating for a founder to know that you have something workable and to not get any particular negative feedback, but not to get any traction in fundraising. You’re probably left scratching your head as to why.

It might be that your company is a seven—a perfectly acceptable, but not particularly exciting seven.

If you’re trying to be one of the best ten things I see in a year—that I’m willing to risk my investors money on knowing how hard it is to build a company, then a seven just isn’t going to make it.

That’s where the fundraising strategy comes in where you need to decide what you can do to really put your company over the top early. Maybe it means giving extra equity to a standout hire that really takes your team to the next level. Perhaps it means getting a bunch of customer LOIs even before you have the product ready—leaving VCs to wonder how you even got a meeting having so little built.

Think about asking investors what would make your pitch a ten—what crazy accomplishment that they could imagine would be gamechanging for your pitch, especially if you’re feeling like you’re not getting negative feedback. If you’re not getting negative feedback, but you’re not getting a check, you need to find out what you’re missing to move from a seven to a ten.

Reminder—this week I’m hosting another charity pitch workshop session. If you want me to go really in depth on fixing your story and presentation, while supporting some good causes, check out Fix Your Pitch for Good.

It’s that time of year again—the season of people quitting their jobs soon to start a company. I don’t know whether it’s New Years resolutions or end of year bonuses, but I feel like there’s a bit of a peak in people wrapping up previous things looking to start something new.

If you’re going that route—here are a couple of things I would suggest:

Have at least six months of personal expenses in the bank—and that’s only if you know you can at least get some angel capital based around your connections to investors, friends, family, etc. It should take you at least that long from having an idea before the idea is fully vetted in order for it to be worth investing in. Sometimes it’s shorter, but you always want to be conservative in this case.

Understand where similar companies have struggled and tackle that part first. If enterprise sales is the hard part of what you’re doing, figure out how you can de-risk that first—maybe by trying to pitch some vaporware to buyers or perhaps getting them to pay you to build it on a consulting basis. Think about what investors are going to ask to see that you’ve done when you pitch, and how early you can pull proof of being able to do that into the present.

Build a following around what you’re doing. Whatever you’re working on, it’s easier to do if you’re a leader in that space—so for the next six months, how can you visibly be a leader? Write a newsletter. Host events. Start a podcast. Build up the parade of people who will get behind you—because it will be easier to find customers, investors and hires as an insider than as someone trying to break in.

Get out of the house. Too often, “working on an idea” means alone at your computer. Talking directly to customers and the people most familiar with a problem firsthand, because they worked at or started something similar, should be your first priority.

Be deliberate in terms of what you want to get out of investors. Investors are better for pointing you in the direction of people in their network with expertise and letting you know how they think about your pitch—but not necessarily about the quality of the idea. Too often, an entrepreneur asks me what I think of something, when what I really want to know is what they think. You shouldn’t have to ask me if an idea is good—it’s your responsibility to know that it is, because you’re taking other people’s money to risk on it.

That being said, there is a lot of variability in terms of how an idea can be presented—whether it is well understood, etc. I’m working on two things that should help founders get early feedback:

First, I’m continuing my "Fix Your Pitch” series—where founders can get their idea workshopped in exchange for a charity donation. This way, founders who are far too early, or perhaps not getting the investor uptake they’re hoping for, can just skip to the front of the line while contributing to some good causes. I’m raising for Code Nation, the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse, the Challenged Athletes Foundation and the Red Hook Initiative.

Second, I’m working on a new stealth project that enables founders to get feedback from investors in a fast and easy way. If you’re interested in testing out a way to understand if the investor market is keen on your idea, fill out this form to get in on the early beta:

Over the last five years ago, a disproportionate amount of venture capital funded paid acquisition on Facebook. Some very large consumer facing businesses were built, but that gravy train won’t last forever—and signs are that it is seriously slowing down. Companies are reporting that acquisition costs are trending up, and optimization is increasingly feeling like squeezing blood from a stone.

Having 90% of your marketing dollars go not only to one channel, but to use just one company’s platform is always a risky strategy—but now, in particular, it feels like Facebook is at a serious crossroads. Not since it’s pre-IPO days has the company looked so vulnerable. I’d even argue that the company’s continued attention dominance has more to do with the ineptitude of Google and Apple to build compelling consumer facing software than the quality of what Facebook is doing. The core Facebook offering is declining in usage and engagement—and if it wasn’t for the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, more alarms would be ringing.

I’m not saying Facebook is going away—but the chance of a major shift in either the platform itself or the way consumers use it is increasing. If you lived easy on a fancy waterfront property full time, and the chance of flooding went up for 0.1% to 5%, wouldn’t you give serious thought to buying a second home somewhere? That’s what startup companies need to do with their marketing.

What I would argue is that companies should think more about building their own communities—and that, while easier, the mantra of meet the people where they are may have, to quote Batman Begins, “sacrificed sure footing for a killing stroke”. Because companies never had to gather communities on their own, their ability to do so withered.

It’s time to start the long and hard work of rebuilding that competency.

Consider a thought experiment. What if you got to keep the same marketing budget but couldn’t spend any of it on Facebook ads—or perhaps even Google for that matter. You can post all the content you want to these platforms, but you just can’t goose it with ad spend. Would you be able to, at some point, hit all your acquisition targets at the same cost? How would you spend it?

Much of this spend would undoubtedly go to content creation, which will tie to SEO, experiential marketing, influencer strategies, referral and ambassador campaigns, events, etc. You’d be forced to make sure that every bit of marketing you created would be worthy of engagement—attendance, sharing, etc.

Shouldn’t it be anyway? Did paying your way to a lot of shares and likes lower the quality of the marketing you produced? The content you create should all hit the bar of “If this is the only thing people saw of us, people would make time to consume it, they would understand what we were about, and they’d subscribe to more of it.”

The only reason to rethink your marketing is that when you consider what it takes to get that next round of financing, investors are going to want to see you stand out in the ways that value in your business will be created. In the consumer category, the ability to stand out and acquire customers is paramount—and if you’re just mindlessly doing what everyone else is, you’re going to be harder and harder pressed to get a VC excited enough to fund future growth.

If I’m going to call it out when Donald Trump does it, trying to block the flow of free trade with tariffs, or block the flow of people through immigration bans, then I should be consistent about it on the local level. I would never say that one company shouldn’t be free to expand to a new city.

That being said, I don’t like paying people to do anything they were going to do anyway—and this is especially the case when it comes to economic incentives. It bothers me, for example, when condo builders get tax incentives to build luxury condos in NYC when it’s pretty clear you can still make plenty of money without them—and it’s not like they would pick up and start building condos in West Virginia if they got better tax treatment.

So when it comes to Amazon’s “HQ2a”, my hope is that NYC doesn’t break the bank offering the company lots of free stuff when it’s pretty clear that NYC has the most amazing talent pool on the east coast and is absolutely one of the most desirable places to live. I doubt the city really needed to offer them much in the way of anything to come here—so to be clear, I’m against spending taxpayer dollars to benefit big companies that don’t need the money.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want them here.

The presence of Amazon as a corporate participant in this ecosystem could be a big positive. For one, Amazon has the ability to attract talent from other places much like Google did when they first moved to NYC. Google was a net positive on the NYC tech ecosystem. No one works for big companies forever, so 3-4 years from now, we’ll start seeing Amazon talent hit the market, build companies, etc.

One argument I don’t buy into is “Amazon kills small businesses”. Amazon is a retailer—and any commodity item you’re buying on Amazon is, chances are, not something you normally buy from a small business. If anything, Amazon puts more stress on big box retailers. You’re buying things on Amazon you normally would have bought from Barnes & Noble or Best Buy. Sure, retailers take their pound of flesh when it comes to passing you on to their customer base—and that’s why so many business are trying to go the direct route—building online relationships with their own customers. There’s evidence, actually, that retailers that embrace experience are actually thriving in a world of Amazon. The number of indie bookstores, for example, has been growing for years. As it turns out, once Amazon killed off Barnes & Nobel, it created room for indie bookstores to return to the retail landscape, because it was bigger bookstores that were killing them, not specifically the internet.

I don’t mind an economic landscape where if I want to buy paper towel, Amazon sends it to me, but if I want to buy anything special whatsoever, I shop locally or directly with the brands I actually interact with.

One of the key questions people are asking is where all of these people are going to live, how they’re going to commute and what it’s going to do to existing economic inequality in the city.

These are real problems, that the local government hasn’t properly addressed for many years. We still don’t have a big enough housing solution, nor do we have adequate protections for the displacement that happens to certain neighborhoods during periods of economic growth. I would love to see the tech community work hard to lead the conversation on solutions we should adopt to make the growth of industry in NYC a positive and ethnically conscious force for change. I have no interest in seeing tech become the bad guy that it has in SF—but similarly, part of what’s going on there is a lack of will on behalf of the government to fix structural issues that tech is exacerbating.

I’m excited about the possibilities for Amazon in NYC—but cautious that our elected representatives will do the hard work to ensure they land in our community, not on it.

Over the years, I’ve spoken at a bunch of NY tech conferences—and they vary widely in terms of their success.

A few things remain consistent:

Organizers complain how difficult it is to get people to show up.

Attendees don’t stay.

Even when they do stay, they’re not super engaged.

Here are a few tips for organizers if you’re going to put on a conference here. It’s very possible and I’ve been to some good ones—and the best ones all have some common attributes.

The biggest thing that conference organizers don’t seem to understand is the following:

New York City is not one tech community.

New York is a multi-industry town. We have media startups, healthcare startups, real estate tech startups, fintech startups—every kind of startup you can imagine. The advice, connections, and customers they seek are in all sorts of different verticals, and so it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to build out a conference where paying hundreds of dollars and spending a day makes sense to someone if only 10% of the content and audience is relevant.

That’s become even more true as startup content flourishes online. In NYC, more and more people have joined startups, so they’re more familiar with the basics. Ten or twelve years ago, you could do a generalized tech conference about the “101” of startup life and a lot of New York founders would get a lot out of it, but now we’ve basically all gotten up to speed, read the posts, watched the videos, etc.

The only way to do a conference here that isn’t vertical specific is to make it about a horizontal—something that all startups have on their todo list that they find difficult, like fundraising, recruiting, marketing, etc.

And if you’re going to do a fundraising one, it needs to have real check writers—partners from known VC funds with deals in their track record people know. It’s ok if you get the occasional principal, but the majority of the speakers need to be people who could lead my deal that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. Analysts and associates aren’t difficult to access and they have less experience—and while they’re a smart bunch on the whole, they’re just not going to be a big attendee draw.

The other thing about conferences is that, in general, they aren’t very good—for either the audience or the participants.

People are growing tired of not only the format, but the lack of work actually put into the content itself. There’s a lack of research and vetting that goes into topics, and panel moderators fail to create narrative. Moderating is a skill. Invite people people who are good at it, or train them.

A few tips for panel moderators:

Know what you want the panel to say before you ask it. Create the narrative you want to share beforehand, and select your panelists and questions to reflect that.

Ask questions that will get at meaningful, specific answers. Don’t ask, “What are you seeing?” or “What’s exciting to you?” because the question is too open-ended to be weaved into a coherent narrative.

Don’t ask any question to more than two people on your panel, regardless of how many people are on your panel. You’re better off with less answers to more questions than the other way around, so bounce around, directing questions to specific people they’re most relevant to. After two, the answers get repetitive—and there’s nothing worse than a panelists wasting time with a “I agree with everyone else here” or “I don’t have much to add, but…”

Also, why does every session need to be a panel? Mix up the formats. Ask key, experienced attendees to lead small group sessions. Leave more time for hallway conversations.

Curation of attendees and speakers is incredibly important—which is why you really need industry insiders to be in charge of the content and speaker invites. Just because someone raised a round or two of capital doesn’t make them a great speaker with a compelling narrative—nor should they be asked how to run a successful startup, because they aren’t successful yet. Vet panelists and topics with the kinds of people you’d love to see at the conference before you invite anyone.

Diversity is not difficult—you just need to want it.

There are a ton more interesting people with unique perspectives on a topic that aren’t all straight, white and male. Just because they don’t sign up right away doesn’t mean it’s too hard to find them. Reaching out to communities of women and/or color with specific invites will help—as well as making sure these potential attendees can see people with similar perspectives participating at high levels at the conferences

If you want influential/VIP type attendees to stick around at the conference, you have to give them something to do. If someone is speaking at 2pm, they’re not going to necessarily come for lunch unless they’re captaining a table conversation. They’re not going to stay after unless you’re organizing some people for them to meet.

Every conference needs a Code of Conduct. Here’s one that I used previously. There’s no better way to empower victims of bad professional behavior than to explicitly state how people should behave, giving clear indications of organizers wanting to be aware when people step over the line..

Lastly, logistics is important to NYC conferences. If it isn’t near a subway, you’re going to be hard-pressed to get anyone to attend—unless you’ve already got a community following or you’re an oversubscribed conference to begin with. First year conferences really need to focus on lowering the barriers to participation.